Agents are starting to act on behalf of organisations — buying tools, commissioning research, moving money. Governance is what turns that from an experiment into something an operating committee can sign off: explicit authority, enforcement that does not depend on a model's judgement, a person accountable for every exception, and the ability to withdraw permission at any moment.
Sandbox only. No custody, no customer funds and no live payment execution.
Every agent operates under an explicit mandate: a monthly ceiling, a per-transaction limit, permitted and prohibited categories, and the threshold above which a human must sign. Governance starts by writing the authority down in a form a system can enforce, rather than relying on a prompt or a policy document nobody can execute.
No language model decides whether an action is allowed. Each intent is evaluated by ordinary application logic in a fixed order — category restrictions, per-transaction ceiling, remaining monthly authority, approval threshold, new-counterparty rule — and every check returns a readable reason. The same input always produces the same decision, which is what makes a control auditable.
Anything outside the mandate routes to a named approver with the decision rights for that scope, not to an anonymous queue. Governance fails when an exception can be cleared by whoever happens to be online; it holds when the record shows which human accepted the risk.
Each action produces a sequential record: what was attempted, which clause applied, what the outcome was, who was accountable and when. Evidence is generated as the decision is made, not reconstructed from logs during a review.
Delegated authority is only safe if it can be taken back. Any mandate can be suspended or revoked in one action, and the agent's next attempt is refused rather than queued. Governance is the ability to stop, not only to observe.
In the NIVQRA demonstration workspace, the fictional operator Northstar Systems runs agents at each of these stages at once — a research agent under observation, a procurement agent operating inside written limits, and a growth agent whose prohibited-category attempts are refused outright.